Turnout buying is a mainstay of machine politics. Despite strong theory that selective incentives should spur turnout, meta-analyses of empirical studies show no effect, thus making machine politics seem irrational and unsustainable. I argue that the apparent failure of turnout buying is an artefact of common measurement decisions in experimental and observational research that lump together turnout buying, abstention buying, and vote-choice buying. Data generated using these compound measures include countervailing and null effects that drive estimates of the effects of each strategy toward zero. I show that machines have incentives to diversify their strategies enough to make compound measures substantially underestimate the impact of turnout buying. I propose simple alternative measurement approaches and show how they perform using new survey data and a constituency-level analysis of machine strategy in Mexico. Findings close the gap between theory and facts and reaffirm the rationality of machine politics.

We propose a generalised version of configuration spaces defined by disallowing combinations of simultaneous collisions among the n points determined by a family of forbidden partitions. In the case where the underlying space is a finite graph, we construct a cubical complex with the same homology as this configuration space.

The irony behind a simple definition of ‘[t]rusts for the transfer of money or other property for a specified purpose’1 is that, in continuing to name them after Barclays Bank v Quistclose Investments,2 the doctrine seems to be as elusive as ever.3 In China Life Trustees v China Energy Reserve and Chemicals Group Overseas Company,4 the task of throwing light on the Quistclose trust fell to the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal (HKCFA) for the first time.

Aquinas’ anthropology is commonly believed to prevent the mind–body problem by treating the human being as one substance, and the soul as a formal cause. Thomists’ descriptions of Aquinas’ anthropology tend to understate or even omit its more dualistic elements, e.g., that the soul is an agent cause that moves the body, and that acts through the mediation of the ‘corporeal spirits’. More importantly, these descriptions overlook that Aquinas himself recognizes a problem of mental causality and even argues for some solutions to it. This paper aims to show that there is such a problem within Aquinas’ conceptual frame, and that contemporary Thomist anthropologies are also vulnerable to it.

Understanding the population structure and genetic diversity of green turtles is crucial for effective conservation. This study investigated the occurrence, genetic composition, and potential origins of green turtles (Chelonia mydas) in the Potiguar Basin, northeastern Brazil, based on stranding data from 2010 to 2019. Analysis revealed that 87.36% of the population consisted of juveniles, primarily females with a curved carapace length (CCL) between 30 and 59.9 cm. Genetic analysis of the mtDNA control region (481 bp, n = 39) revealed eight haplotypes, with CM-A8 (48.7%) and CM-A5 (30.8%) being the most common. This may be related to the geographic position of the Potiguar Basin, located in the ‘corner’ of the South American continent. High haplotype diversity and low nucleotide diversity were observed, consistent with other Brazilian foraging grounds. Mixed stock analysis identified Ascension Island as the primary source population, followed by Guinea-Bissau and Surinam. The results highlight the importance of the Potiguar Basin as a foraging area for green turtles and emphasize the need for comprehensive conservation strategies to protect this vulnerable population.

Stewardship processes were compared across 123 hospitals that differed on a risk-adjusted post-discharge antibiotic use metric. Low-performing hospitals were less likely than high-performing hospitals to report routine interactions between their stewardship physician and pharmacist(s) (OR 0.12, 95% CI 0.03–0.55) and to have local antibiotic-prescribing guidelines (OR 0.21, 95% CI 0.05–0.93)

In their recent article ‘Europe’s political constitution’, Alexander Somek and Elisabeth Paar conclude: ‘scholactivism is the form of constitutional law of Europe. There is nothing below or above it. It is all there is’. In this reply I want to take issue with such (rather bleak) view of what European constitutional scholarship is about. Firstly, I argue that scholactivism undermines the very conditions of scholarship as a pursuit of knowledge autonomous from both public and private power. The current attacks on academic institutions by authoritarian governments, and also the increasing dependence of research on private funders result, at least in part, from the politicization of scholarship. Secondly, I argue that we should be more critical towards the infrastructure of the digital public sphere, which Somek and Paar see to be emerging through blogs and other platforms, and be more protective of the existing practices that we inherited from our predecessors.

We consider uniformly random lozenge tilings of simply connected polygons subject to a technical assumption on their limit shape. We show that the edge statistics around any point on the arctic boundary, that is not a cusp or tangency location, converge to the Airy line ensemble. Our proof proceeds by locally comparing these edge statistics with those for a random tiling of a hexagon, which are well understood. To realize this comparison, we require a nearly optimal concentration estimate for the tiling height function, which we establish by exhibiting a certain Markov chain on the set of all tilings that preserves such concentration estimates under its dynamics.